October 17, 2006

Dear Colleague,

    On October 8, the new Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, went to Beijing to mend fences with China. The two countries were not on speaking terms because China was deeply offended by the former Japanese prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi's insistence on paying respects at Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine. What's wrong with visiting a shrine for dead soldiers that many Japanese regard as their Arlington Cemetery? Well, this particular shrine happens to contain the remains of fourteen top war criminals from the second world war, including those of General Tojo, the executed war leader. A museum adjacent to the shrine paints Japan's war on China as one of liberation! Worse still, a bookstore with books that characterize the Chinese as an inferior people (don't they spit on the floor?) is located on the first floor of Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs (The Economist, October 7, 2006).

    Just about every one has heard of the Rape of Nanking in 1937 (see Iris Chang's book by that name). My family escaped to Shanghai just in time. A few months of delay on our part, and yours truly won't be here to pester you with letters. Fewer people have heard of the ways the Japanese used Chinese men for medical teaching and research. Yes, not just research, but also teaching. Japanese medical students went to northeast China, where they practiced surgery on live bodies. A Chinese man was laid out on a table and given a general anesthetic. One Japanese student dug out a kidney, another chopped off a limb, until just a bloody torso remained, still alive. These unspeakable atrocities were well documented. (See Sheldon Harris, Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932-45, and the American Cover-Up, Routledge, 1994). Note the "American Cover-Up" in the subtitle. The American occupying military knew full well what went on, but didn't want the atrocities exposed because Japan had become America's fair-haired boy. After all, wasn't General Douglas MacArthur Japan's first post-war emperor? You don't want bad smell to foul the Chrysanthemum/Eagle throne, do you?

    What is troubling is that even today the Japanese refuse to fully acknowledge the extent of the horrors they committed in China. The contrast with Germany is striking. Ever since the end of the second world war, Germany as a nation has been wearing the hair-shirt, beating its breast and crying, "I am foul" for all to hear. Whereas Japan has a museum that paints a rosy picture of itself in the war, Germany has any number of museums and Topographies of Terror that announce its own sinful past. It is quite all right for even Japanese officials to say that they never did much amiss. In democratic Germany, which fully respects free speech, it is a crime to say that Holocaust never happened.

    The only way I can understand the difference is that Japan and Germany are two cultures. The concept of confession followed by forgiveness is totally alien to Japanese people. German Christianity has allowed Nazism to happen, to its everlasting shame. But the Germans have enough Christianity in them to beg forgiveness of Israel, something the Japanese cannot even imagine doing of China.

    The French don't welcome Turkey into the European Union on the grounds that it doesn't recognize the genocide committed against Armenians during the first world war. But admitting wrong and then asking forgiveness isn't part of Islamic culture either.

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu